Those new tagged/released versions contain half a year of work since the previous versions released during summer 2018. The primary focus was on bug-fixing and stabilization as well as some major new features, such as inter-BSC-handover support in osmo-bsc.

You can find pre-compiled binary packages of our latest release for a variety of Debian and Ubuntu GNU/Linux versions at Latest_Builds.

the asciidoc source of the user manuals + VTY reference manuals is now always kept inside the respective repository: osmo-bts.git contains the osmo-bts manual. Before this, we used to have all manuals in osmo-gsm-manuals.git.

logging vty: deprecate the 'everything' keyword

various logging related improvements

various improvements of osmo_fsm

new osmo-config-merge utility

SGsAP protocol encoding/decoding (SGsAP not yet part of osmo-msc!)

GSMTAP definitions for LTE RRC and NAS sub-types

introduce osmo_timerfd support as part of libosmocore (recurring timers)

During this summer we have been working on the project, and despite the lack of time (daily job, traveling, etc.), some important features were introduced, so we are happy to highlight them.

First of all, the project has it's own wiki now, as well as a separate bug/feature tracker. For a long time, there was only a single page with brief description within the OsmocomBB project wiki. Having a dedicated project in Redmine, we are able to provide well structured description and documentation for our milestones. Kudos to Harald Welte!

A few weeks ago, the first milestone has been completed - "Ability to run GSM network on any frequency"! We have managed to run a GSM network in 2.4 GHz WiFi band, connect an SDR-based phone and successfully tested the regular subscriber's activity, such as SMS messaging and voice calls. More details about this feature will be shared soon.

Work on frequency hopping is also ongoing. Up to this point we used OsmoTRX for the purpose of testing of new features in the real world. As OsmoTRX currently doesn't support frequency hopping, we needed to find something else to test this functionality. For this purpose we hooked our mobile station to a Racal 6103E tester (kudos to Sylvain Munaut) that has support for frequency hopping, and currently it is possible to perform location registration and assignment of a traffic channel with it.

The Osmocom project (if you count its predecessor OpenBSC) have been running for close to 10 years, creating a large number of Open Source projects related to mobile communications. We have never needed nor wanted any legal entity for it. It's a pure/classic FOSS project, open to contributions from anyone.

Until today, you could only contribute in one of the following forms:

by writing code (bug fixes, new features, etc) and submitting it (which means you need to be a developer)

by writing documentation / improving the wiki

helping other users on the mailing lists, IRC, or in other forums

donating cellular equipment (which many don't have)

hiring a freelancer or a company to write code and contribute to Osmocom on your behalf

buying products or services from companies who dedicate lots of work to Osmocom

However, we've repeatedly getting requests from some individuals who wanted to contribute to the project in an easy way, even if they are not a developer, and/or don't have time, and/or don't have the size of a budget to fund development of entire new features or sub-systems.

Today, Osmocom announces that we have joined Open Collective in order to enable you to make financial contributions, either one-off or recurring.

We'll be using the funds (if we get any!) according to our funding policy outlined at https://opencollective.com/osmocom/expenses/new# in order to pay for expenses such as hosting costs for our servers / IT infrastructure, travel funding for the annual developer conferences, etc. Any and all expenses paid from those funds will be visible on the OpenCollective website. You cannot ask for more transparency than that :)

one of the difficulties with OsmoCon2017 last year was that almost nobody submitted talks / discussions within the deadline, early enough to allow for proper planning.

This lead to the situation where the sysmocom team had to come up with a schedule/agenda on their own. Later on much after the CfP deadline,people then squeezed in talks, making the overall schedule too full.

It is up to you to avoid this situation again in 2018 at OsmoCon2018 by submitting your talk RIGHT NOW. We will be very strict regarding late submissions. So if you would like to shape the Agenda of OsmoCon 2018, this is your chance. Please use it.

We will have to create a schedule soon, as [almost] nobody will register to a conference unless the schedule is known. If there's not sufficient contribution in terms of CfP response from the wider community, don't complain later that 90% of the talks are from sysmocom team members and only about the Cellular Network Infrastructure topics.